My S6 is a 56 plate. Only recently I started noticing blue smoke emitting from my exhaust only when pulling off at lights/roundabouts etc... It can be a nasty puff.
If I start my car from cold in the morning there is NEVER any blue smoke. This only happens if the car has been idling for any brief period and then I press down on the accelerator. I have burnt off over 3 litres of oil in 3 months! Took it to Audi who would charge £400 to diagnose the fault (something about using a camera to look into the engine).
One way or another it looks serious! My car only has 61K miles on it and has been driven with care. All Audi service history and Longlife services at the prescribed intervals. Last service was 22nd December 2011. There was no smoke at all at that service!! Part of that last service included 10 coil packs to be changed as part of a recall.
If the coil packs were faulty, could they have contributed towards whatever damage has occurred??
Basically, my engine is nothing short of a write-off. I know I am out of warranty but surely I should have a case if I take this to Audi UK?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

Regards

Danni

 

Hi there. Hmm it's not looking good.
I have heard stories of dealers contacting Audi and they were compassionate and did the work under warranty or at a reduced rate. Also heard Audi essentially said sorry but tough luck on that.
It could be a number of things.
Oil getting past the piston rings, valve seals, cylinder head gasket. If your car has turbos then they could be letting oil into the combustion chambers too.
None of this is going to be cheap.
Thing is, as you have religiously kept up the official service history, you might have a fighting chance if getting Audi to sort this out for you. You will have an even better chance if you can get your dealer to contact Audi on your behalf to fight your corner.
Give it a try and see how you go.

 

Hi Brityank,

Thanks for the reply. I will book it in with Audi tomorrow. I think they should fight my corner on this one.

Regards

Danni

 

OK update on the car.

Had the car booked in with Audi on Thursday. They didn't have time to look at it on Thursday so that rolled over to Friday. At 5pm on Friday I arrived at Audi dealership and sat down to talk about car.

I was told that my car needed a new engine. The man had a "workshop report" from Audi in front of him. This is an "international log" of problems that Audi report on that can actually happen. He had a report from an S6. I was told that my engine had hard metallic knocking noises particularly at idle speed (he is reading this off report), the noises are particularly noticeable at cold start during the cat heating phase. In advanced stages, increased oil consumption (still reading report) blue smoke, erratic idle speed, misfiring and compression loss are possible. He says "So we've got lots of smoke and lots of noises, so this is what we're talking about.
I said, "I haven't noticed any difference at any stage in the performance of the car or the noise of the engine."
He said "No, you probably won't at the moment. The reason for it is, extreme load of the running in phase of the engine."
He then quoted from the report again
"An extreme load in the running in phase of the engine can cause abrasion on the running of surfaces of the cylinder. Abrasion can widen the cylinder pipe and in advanced stages tilt the piston into the pipe. So basically wears the bores"

At this stage I said "But this is an assumption."
He said "No it's not, because we took out a spark plug and dropped an endoscope down into the engine and we can see scoring on the bores, aluminium wear. The wear collects in the sump, like a black sludge at the bottom of the sump."

Whilst he was saying this, he was showing me a photo of sludge in the sump of an S6. Not my S6.
He quoted his report again "The rubbed off aluminium can be found as a thin layer of fine grey sludge on the bottom of the oil sump."

So they didn't take the sump off because that was a "lot of extra labour" but they did put an endoscope down the spark plug hole and confirm that the engine has got "worn cylinders"

Again I asked whether it was due to any other reason except excessive wear/load at the running in phase of the engine, he said no, there was no other reason.

I asked him what "excessive" was on a V10 car. He said he didn't know "possible high RPM (it's an automatic, it doesn't allow you to red line it!), "increased load, blah, blah"

He said that he will contact Audi to see if there is any good will. He reminded me that the car is not in warranty (thanks) and that the car was bought outside the Audi network (thank, yes this is true, I bought from a dealer in December 2010 who gave me a year warranty).

Next he told me that the cost of the engine was wait for it................ £15,000.

At this stage I asked, "during all the times that the car has been serviced with yourselves, you were not able to pick any of this up?" he said "no not really. Not unless we took the sump off and we would not have any reason to do that."

I then asked if I could have a copy of his report, he said "I can't give you this, it's an Audi document."

I said, "so where is my paperwork?", he said "well there isn't any because we haven't charged you for this. We've only dropped a camera down a hole and found the problem." he then said "I can give you the documentation, but the moment I do, this will get logged on Audi's national system. So anyone that checks out this chassis number will see that it's got an engine problem"

So this is the second time in a week that my car has gone in for a diagnostics and both times have not been charged and nothing has been logged! I was fully expecting to pay between £400 and £500 as previously quoted! I was very surprised at this.

He then gave me a cheaper option of a "short engine" between £10,000 and £11,000.

Anyway, the way I left it was with him contacting Audi on Monday to see if there is any good will. So have to wait until tomorrow.

I would be grateful for any advice. I don't know a bloody thing about mechanics but I do have a good instinct for deception. I find everything I was told very hard to swallow.

Many Thanks

Danni

 

Hi there,

I'm french and a member of the french Audi forum.

I've order a used S6 that I should receive this week, and I've been interestingly reading this post. The "one" is 46000 miles (I did the conversion, don't bother doing it ^^).

First of all, I hope you have this issue correctly sorted out !
What are the news from Audi and your car today ?
How did Audi UK react to this ?

What did you mean by "short engine" ? Does it mean only a piece of the engine, or a used one, or... ?

In France, we are witnessing the same issues on V10 S6's, but very few though. I think we've only got 2 known occurences of this. But I can see we have at least one here, in UK...

This brings me to thing that there are only very few problems of that kind, so I'm just assuming (and hoping!) the proportion across all sold S6's is very low. On the other hand, I can't ignore this isn't a common car, and a lot less spread than Diesels for instance...

Audi France reactions are so poor I don't even want to discuss about this... basically, you have a criminal car, a criminal driving style, so don't cry with your ruined engine.
A lot of trials are ongoing with Audi France and some of the known cases have been brought to Audi Germany, and appeared to go a lot better, but I don't know more.

Thanks ! Looking forward to reading from you !

Lars